Laure Z Hypnotizes Us in French with Dreamy New Single and Rallies Marginalized Americans with a Protest Anthem

Laure Z may have grown up in France, but it's the discrimination and oppression she sees in America that inspired her to write "The Calling," a song that will be on her second EP when it drops in 2019.

TooFab's TooGood Artist of the Month stopped by our studio to perform the track, which she described as "a bit of a protest song."

"Although France is a little more conservative in some ways, I've experienced so much more things in America where people really do have to fight to just be," she explained. "Whether it's the whole Black Lives Matter movement or gay rights, we're all the same. We're all people."

The song invokes one of America's most central ideals: freedom. "We all have the right to be free / until the end we'll stand / who can say who we wanna to be / for in the end we are all the same," she sings in the chorus that we can't get out of our head.

"It's mainly for all the people that are out in the streets to fight for their rights," she said. "I always wonder why if it doesn't bother me, if it doesn't hurt me or harm me in anyway, why I would be bothered by them being who they are. Just let people be who they want to be."

She performed two other tracks during our studio session, as well; "Lover," a catchy folk tune inspired by her connection to her boyfriend, and our personal favorite, "Rêves Ephémères," which is the song that caught our ear to begin with.

It's a dreamy acoustic ballad that is unlike anything you'll hear on the radio these days -- although we're confident you wouldn't touch the tuner if you did. If the finger-plucked melody doesn't immediately draw you in, her smooth, soulful vocals certainly will, even though you probably won't be able to understand a word. Though the Berkley graduate sings in English on most of her songs we've heard, she channeled her native language for the track, which translates to "Ephemeral Dreams."

It's a collaboration with Los Angeles-based producer Mitchell Haeuszer, who released the song earlier this fall as a single off of his own LP, "Amulet" (now streaming on Spotify), under the stage name HAUS Music.

The song began with a guitar riff, and after a discussion about the feeling of the song, it was off to the races. "Words started coming to me in French, and I started writing on my phone and started to come up with that melody," she explained. "That whole idea of ephemeral dreams -- something that you envision, but it's not lasting. So yeah, we wrote that song in two sessions."

You can hear a sample of it in Laure's interview above, but for those who fall for it as hard as we did, we went ahead and cut the entire performance for your viewing pleasure in the video below.

Laure Z released her first EP, "Girls Don't Wait," earlier this year, and is already hard at work on a second. One would think a beautiful French girl singing with a charming accent would be a draw, but she said it's been "a challenge" to get enough exposure to build a fanbase because of the unique nature of her sound. "I studied jazz and I like orchestral music, so I tried to combine, infuse all of these different things together," she said of the six-track record, now streaming on Spotify and everywhere else.

Although she's "taking a bit more of an acoustic route" on her new music, she's not giving up on jazz, a style she's been studying since middle school and one her sultry voice is perfectly suited for.

"It's hard. I've been struggling with that thought for a while," she said when asked if she feels pressure to help preserve jazz through her music. "Should I just go with what people want to listen to and go mainstream, or should I just keep doing what I want to do? I feel like there is no reason for me to not do what I like and feel like dong. There's always an audience for every type of music."

"Jazz is something that I love," she continued, and pointed out it's more popular in America right now than most people probably even realize. "The Christmas songs that you guys listen to, they're all jazzy. So yeah, I want to do it all. I don't want to stick to one thing."

And speaking of the festive holiday that's right around the corner, Laure recently took a stab at covering one of the most iconic Christmas songs of all time -- "The Christmas Song" -- and we highly recommend you add it to your yuletide playlist.